Knobcottage in China

China has two main telecom providers,  China Telecom and Unicom. To have any chance of doing anything in China, you need a SIM card (phone card).  Why? well without a telephone number you can't, to name but a few: get post delivered* order online pay for many things book taxis book tickets ...and to get a sim card, must be simple, "Yes?"..."No".  As a Chinese national you go to the phone shop, there are usually five shops per hundred meters.  Bring your ID, get your photo taken and matched to a national database, set up a payment plan. That is what the guideleines say should be the case for foreigners too!  It is not.  I turned up with: My passport My Work permit My medical card My Visa My Residence Permit My Chinese bank card was that enough? No.  All of these cards and permits have been nationally validated, all of them have my picture on them, but as a foreigner, that is not enough.  It appears that I need the ID card...

If you have been reading this from the start, and there is no reason why you should have been, then you'll realise that in China, anything to do with bureaucracy is to say the least difficult.  It's not like the 'jobsworhts' in the UK where people get fed up and become deliberately obstructive to the point of driving you mad, its different here.  Of course this is not a criticism, just an observation.  Everybody needs their copy of everything.  Everything has to be a paper copy, electronic copies won't do, and it has to be photocopied.  So by about the tenth depratment's photocopy of a photocopy, the sheet being photocopied is illegible and dark grey, but a fresh copy from an electronic source won't do, because it has to be a photocopy, and a copy printed from and electronic source, such as my phone is not a photocopy, so it won't do.  Fair enough.  However China must have be at least forty copies of every document I possess, and because those documen...